Hacking Facebook to remove the social value facade

We see [Ben Grosser’s] point that all the metrics found on the Facebook user interface make the experience somewhat of a game to see if you can better your high score. He thinks this detracts from the mission of having social interactions that themselves have a value. So he set out to remove the ‘scores’ from all Facebook pages with a project he calls the Facebook Demetricator.

You can see two UI blocks above. The upper offering is what a normal user will see. The lower is the page seen through the lens of the Demetricator. [Ben’s] feels it doesn’t matter how many people like something or share something, but only that you are genuinely interested in it. With the numbers removed you’re unlikely to follow the herd mentality of only clicking through to things that are liked by a huge number of people. He explains this himself in the clip after the break.

The Demetricator works much like the Reddit Enhancement Suite. It’s a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that selectively strips out the metrics as the page renders.

19 thoughts on “Hacking Facebook to remove the social value facade”

I still prefer the “antisocial” plugin for adblock:http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
removes all thise like,poke,share buttons completely.
I’m not using facebook, so I prefer the web without their tags everywhere.

Not to be an ass, but I believe you mean asocial, meaning does not take part in the “average” social realm of the world nor does he enjoy it, where as antisocial is something of a view like “I want to watch the world burn” (most likely literaly) or if someone attempts to start a conversation with you you go to their house and stab their cat. A mild difference I would say, and the only reason I know this is because I was tired of being called antisocial, and after enough research, I argued with people who called me antisocial by saying that I’m actualy asocial and that the lifestyle realy pays off.

I believe karl said “antisocial” because that’s the name of the adblock filter.

I take it as meaning “against the so called social buttons” which are nothing social really, they’re called social for marketing reasons, works better than “metrics used to track you around the web, profile your interests and usage to resell to advertisers and clients”

SuperNurd,
I believe he meant the name of the adblock subscription to get the function he describes. It’s called “antisocial”, not “asocial”. There is a homepage link and references to who named the list there, you can probably email them instead.

I’m not a facebook user, but isn’t this just a case of taking something that isn’t awfully useful and making it even less useful? IN the first instance, it conveys information of debatable value, in the second, it just wastes space.

I can see where they were going with this. The bummer, though, is that facebook defaults to showing you the ‘most important stories’ by some unknown hidden metric, so even if you can’t tell how popular it is, it’s still manipulating what you see. It will hide friends stories that it things you don’t want to see based on how often you interact with them. I dislike this personally. I’d love if this plugin let ‘show most recent’ be the default view, as well as showing ‘all’ friends posts (this may not be trivial.)

Of course I’m happy when my posts have a large number of comments. But that’s because it generally means I’m involved in an interesting conversation with friends. I’m not happy because of the numerals themselves that are displayed on the screen, or because I got a “high score”.

Taking the numbers away only removes functionality. It doesn’t magically put more meaning or value into social interactions.

> you’re unlikely to follow the herd mentality of only clicking through to things that are liked by a huge number of people.